Question
The review asked what the published evidence shows about kangaroo mother care and weight gain among low-birthweight neonates, relative to conventional care. This is the completed academic project in the portfolio: a protocol-led synthesis, not a simulation.
Methods
The review followed PRISMA 2020. The search covered PubMed, CINAHL, the Cochrane Library, Scopus, and Web of Science. Eleven studies were included. The work covered screening, data extraction, and risk-of-bias assessment. Effects were synthesised in RevMan 5.4 with random-effects models and standardised mean differences, so studies that measured weight gain on different scales could be combined.
Result reported with the repository
The public repository reports a pooled standardised mean difference of 1.20 for weight gain. The dissertation is the full account of the search, the exclusions, the risk-of-bias judgements, and the forest plot. The repository note does not restate the confidence interval, so that interval is not repeated here.
Why this matters for doctoral work
A meta-analysis is a set of decisions: which studies enter, how risk of bias is judged, which effect measure is used, and when a random-effects model is the honest summary. Those decisions are the same kind of discipline a doctoral chapter has to show. The review is the place I first had to defend them at length.
Materials
The repository holds the dissertation PDF, RevMan files, forest-plot extracts, and a PRISMA checklist: Kangaroo_Mother_Care_Vs_Conventional_Mother_Care.